In the manufacture of hemmed lengths of cloth, such as napkins or other hemmed items, the cloth lengths have been manufactured by cutting lengths of cloth from a generally continuous supply or web of cloth, and manually folding over and sewing through the edge portions of the lengths of cloth to form a neat hem about the length of cloth. In some instances, the corners of the cut lengths of cloth are cut with an angled cut so as to reduce the amount of material in the folded hems that would be formed at the corners of the finished product.
The typical prior art process of forming napkins and other items requires that the cut lengths of cloth be manually handled by sewing machine operators, with the sewing machine operators folding and guiding the edges of the cloth lengths through a sewing machine to form the hems at the edges of the product. While some automated machinery has been developed to relieve the machine operators from continuous and close observation and control of the machines used for hemming cloth lengths, as shown by my prior U.S. Pat. No. 3,722,435, it is still difficult to properly form folded hems on two or three sides or on all four sides of a cloth product with automated machinery. While the process of folding and sewing through the folds to form a hem in the side edges of a continuous length of cloth is relatively simple to perform in an automated process, once the cloth lengths are cut apart to form shorter cut lengths of cloth, the automated procedure becomes much more difficult since it requires individual handling of each cut length of cloth, and the hems formed at the cut ends of the cut lengths of cloth extend over the hems of the adjacent side edges, which adds additional thickness to the product and makes the product even more difficult to handle.